Whose Review

Skyscraper - Multiple Personality Review - No Spoilers

Yippee-ki-yay mother lover! Okay, no character said that in Skyscraper, but they should have. It’s basically a PG-13 remake of Die Hard after all. There’s the law man trapped inside a big-city skyscraper, trying to save his wife from foreign bad guys. There’s the cops on the ground trying to figure out the bad guys’ motives. The news reporters turning it into a media circus. The tech genius controlling the building. John McClane hurts his feet on glass and The Rock has one leg. That last one might be a stretch, but still, the similarities are hard to miss.

Skyscraper is an action film staring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson set inside an imaginary version of the world’s tallest building, which is filled with high-tech gadgets and locations that the filmmakers use to create their action sequences. A group of bad guys takes over the building, trying to steal valuable data from the building’s owner. Dwayne Johnson fights the bad guys while trying to save the day.

This movie is non stop action and every sequence becomes more over-the-top than the last. The problem with that storytelling technique is that it puts a lot of emphasis on the computer generated visuals and this movie failed at that. The CGI throughout the film was a constant distraction that will take audiences out of the suspenseful situations that the filmmakers are trying to achieve.

There was a lot wrong with this film that didn’t need to be; from the obvious casting, to the predictable plot points. Some simple story fixes could have set it back into the realm of reality, eliminated the need for some of the more egregious CGI, and made it a decent action film. But the filmmakers wanted to make every scene so over the top that it became ridiculous.

Whose Review gives Skyscraper the overall score of: Stuck between The Rock and a Die Hard Place. On the one hand, the movie is the dumbest ripoff of Die Hard that someone could possibly come up with, on the other hand, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is always charismatic and fun to watch in action movies. If audiences suspend all disbelief, they might be able to have a good time watching the Rock play John McClane for ninety minutes.

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